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Late last year taxi-app company Uber was hit with a huge data breach that saw the personal information of 57 million users around the world held to ransom by hackers, [...]

This article looks at why the Data Protection Act of 1998 (DPA), as derived from the Data Protection Directive 19961 (DP Directive) has suddenly, over 25 years since its enactment, [...]

Following Urban Splash and Property Weeks competition for two 'meanwhile' uses for a development site in east Manchester, the mayor of Newham, Sir Robin Wales, and mayor of London Boris [...]

Current UK legislation is impacting upon the feasibility and cost-effectiveness of medical record-based research aimed at benefiting the NHS and the public heath. Whereas previous commentators have focused on the Data Protection Act 1998, the Health and Social Care Act 2001 is the key legislation for public health researchers wishing to access medical records without written consent. The Act requires researchers to apply to the Patient Information Advisory Group (PIAG) for permission to access medical records without written permission. We present a case study of the work required to obtain the necessary permissions from PIAG in order to conduct a large scale public health research project. In our experience it took eight months to receive permission to access basic identifying information on individuals registered at general practices, and a decision on whether we could access clinical information in medical records without consent took 18 months. Such delays pose near insurmountable difficulties to grant funded research, and in our case 560 000 [pounds sterling]of public and charitable money was spent on research staff while a large part of their work was prohibited until the third year of a three year grant. We conclude by arguing that many of the current problems could be avoided by returning PIAG's responsibilities to research ethics committees, and by allowing 'opt-out' consent for many public health research projects.

In October 2002, the law of privacy in England, if there ever was one, appeared to come to an abrupt halt in Campbell v. Mirror Group Newspapers plc. (1) Despite [...]

SCHRODINGER'S CAT is a conundrum which holds a special place in the hearts of physicists and philosophers for being a very clever way of illustrating indeterminacy as well as for [...]